Man-Kzin Wars IV by Larry Niven (graded readers .txt) 📗

Long-Reach played with the children while Trainer-of-Slaves was lounging on the giant pillow eating his liver-and-kidney ice cream. He spoke to Nora, unable to keep his eyes off her face.

“Hrr-r. You are very precious to me. I want you alive. But the hyperdrive motor is even more precious. It is precious to the Patriarchy. If you try to escape again, I will kill you.”

“If I don’t kill you first.” She was picking out the purple berries and eating them before tasting her ice cream. She had dimples. It was the first time he noticed.

He grinned, trying hard to imitate a human smile by forcing a curl to his lips. “Forget you ever said that.”

When they reached R’hshssira Nora’s fur was coming in nicely. She wore a lustrous pelt that had changed her from an ugly pink “tail” into a stunningly handsome animal. She could still argue fluently in English, after a fashion, between the pauses, and he hadn’t yet found a way to impregnate her with twins.

CHAPTER 26

(2423 A.D.)

Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig, alias Eater-of-Grass, alias Trainer-of-Slaves, was home and excited. Why did he love that hot stove, R’hshssira? What was Hssin to him? Why was he looking forward to wandering through the old Jotok Run and gossiping with Jotok-Tender?

He sat in the Command Center trying to read the instruments long before they got there. He was babysitting Louis for his Nora-female because the boy’s hostility was running her ragged and she needed a rest.

“Grrough! Stay away from that!” he commanded in slave patois. He whacked the boy, not too hard, and returned to his seat. “Come over here. I’ll have something to show you soon.” He was hoping to interest Louis in the stars. Younglings brought out the father in a kzin, no matter how badly they behaved, and this one was his only male.

The electromagnetic silence disturbed Trainer. Had his instrument gone dead?

Louis was already back into mischief, glancing warily at the kzin to see if he dared do what he really wanted to do. He decided that he could. The kzin was busy.

When the Bitch had maneuvered closer into the R’hshssira system, the electronic telescope confirmed the awful truth. Trainer-of-Slaves let out a wretched scream of anguish. Destruction. The man-ghouls had been here first! They had come and gone. There wasn’t a glimmer of any spacefaring. He howled and clawed the walls!

Louis dived under the astrogator’s desk, terrified, leaving the fragment of plastic wall-stripping half stuffed into the computer slot.

The wrathful kzin saw only a monkey trying to destroy his machine. A claw scooped the screaming child out from under the desk, ripping jaws beheading him to silence the shriek. Angrily Trainer shook the child apart, the bloodlust driving him to devour an arm. But he wasn’t hungry. He dropped the corpse and beat his breast.

The Fanged God had forsaken them without warning! Hssin would have had no news from Ka’ashi—he reverted to the kzin name for Wunderland, unable to speak or think the human words. He howled! Death would have come from the heavens with superluminal surprise! His family wouldn’t have had a chance. His mother! He tore his mane with bloody claws, bellowing. Hamarr the beautiful, his beloved comforter, his youth, his earliest friend! Dead! He stormed around the Control Center, smashing his Ka’ashi relics, things he had collected from that planet with love. Hamarr would have been fascinated by the porcelain, shattered now against the bulkhead.

The rage of a kzin knows no bounds. But it subsides, sometimes into anguished mewling. He went to his oldest friends—Long-Reach, Joker, Creepy, who stared, shocked by the blood on his vest.

“Jotok-Tender is dead,” he wailed, and they grieved with him for grief is the universal emotion that does not even need intelligence to wrack the soul. It comes from the liver.

They helped him clean up the Control Center. A trip to the planet showed the details of the fury of the man-monsters. In some places the destruction was total. Where the power plant had been was only slag. But it doesn’t take much to kill a space colony. Holes in the roofs.

In the Jotok Run they found a desiccated Jotok, one of the wily ferals, clinging to his tree, the powder-dry leaves still green. They found giant Jotok-Tender in his kitchen with a dehydrated grin defiantly threatening a bowl of preserved vatach. His Jotok slave had died trying to help him, now convulsed into an emaciated heap.

By torchlight they found Hamarr holding three tiny mummified kits; not her own, for she was too old to bear such a litter. He hunched beside his mother, taking her dried corpse in his arms, howling in his helmet. Her face still seemed to be whimpering silently, almost alive. Even the flesh-rotting bacteria had died. They found a roomful of suffocated kzinrretti and kits, the room sealed against the poisonous Hssin atmosphere.

Somewhere there must be survivors? Without rest he searched. A shelter, a special life support unit must have withstood the attack? A city that lives in a deadly atmosphere is not one single unit, it is a collection of self-contained cells built around the assumption of disaster. The death of cells is possible—but some cells survive! Trainer searched, for days, with tireless Joker whose arms slept in rotation. Then the kzin had to sleep. All he found were signs of human infantry who had been there after the air attack in a thorough campaign of genocide.

Exile. The crew of the Bitch was still in exile. They were still alone. Eleven Jotoki, one man-female, two orphans and a kzin.

Back on the ship Nora asked him what had happened down there. She wanted to ask him what had become of Louis, but she didn’t dare. She felt his rage. Poor maltreated Louis who hated everybody and would only obey and smile when you were looking straight into his eyes and being stern.

Trainer-of-Slaves had stopped talking to Nora in English, had broken off all her access to her own culture.